Cisco Patches High Severity Flaws in Several Products

Cisco announced on Wednesday the release of software updates that address high severity vulnerabilities in switches and products designed for security and system management.

One of the vulnerabilities is an access control issue affecting the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), a management product that is part of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

The security hole, tracked as CVE-2016-1302, is caused by a logic issue in the role-based access control (RBAC) processing code and it allows an authenticated attacker to make configuration changes that they normally are not allowed to do.

Cisco also revealed that Nexus 9000 switches, which are also a component of ACI, are plagued by a denial-of-service (DoS) bug that can be triggered by a remote, unauthenticated attacker using a specially crafted ICMP packet. This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2015-6398, impacts Cisco Nexus 9000 Series ACI Mode switches running software versions prior to 11.0(1c).

Cisco ASA-CX and Cisco Prime Security Manager (PRSM) products are also affected by a high severity flaw. The weakness, assigned the identifier CVE-2016-1301, allows a remote, authenticated attacker to change the password of any user, including administrators. The networking giant has pointed out that the flaw can be exploited by an attacker who does not have admin privileges using a specially crafted HTTP request.

Cisco ASA-CX Context-Aware Security and Cisco PRSM prior to 9.3.1.1(112) are impacted. It’s worth noting that Cisco has announced end-of-sale and end-of-life dates for these products.

These vulnerabilities have been found by Cisco and the company says there is no evidence that they have been exploited for malicious purposes.

In addition to these flaws, Cisco has released advisories to detail three medium severity issues for which software updates have yet to be released. The bugs are a SQL injection in Unified Communications Manager (UCM), and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the Jabber Guest app and Unity Connection.